Microsoft Word Shortcuts: The Basics

Welcome to our first post from our new Tip of the Week series. In these blog posts we’ll be going over some technical tips to make life easier, whether you are working in Microsoft Office, a desktop publishing software, an accounting software, or a CAT tool. Everyone here at TE is always looking up shortcuts or tricks to help with formatting, translating, and everything in between, so we figured we’d start sharing our findings. Hopefully these tips will help you spend less time creating tables and more time focusing on the translation work we all love!

I work in Word every single day and I’m sure most of you are the same. Whether I’m doing a translation, formatting a translation, taking notes in a meeting, or writing a blog post, I find myself performing the same tasks over and over again. At some point, exasperated, I think, there has got to be an easier way to do this!

Well guess what, there usually is. There are hundreds of keyboard shortcuts in Word (and some work in other Microsoft Office and even Adobe programs) that were created to make your life easier. By pressing keys at the same time or in certain orders you can save, open, or close documents, copy, paste, or highlight text, format fonts or paragraphs, and much more!

This first Tip of the Week will delve into some of the basic shortcuts that everyone should know. In upcoming tips, we’ll look into shortcuts for more complex formatting, how to add accents, and more. All of these shortcuts exist for PC and Mac so I’ve included both with the Mac shortcuts in parenthesis. The “+” in commands is there to show separation between the commands, you do not need to press the plus sign between commands.

I’d recommend bookmarking this page for now so that you can use it as a resource until you have memorized these shortcuts. Once you’ve memorized all 26 of them, you’ll be zooming around Word and quickly opening, creating, formatting, saving, and printing documents!

Do you have a suggestion for a Tip of the Week? Did we miss something in this post? Please let us know on social media or in the comments below!

Thanks for a useful list! In a future post you may wish to add the MS Word KB shortcuts for typing the French accents, Spanish tilda and the German umlauted vowels etc. I find that these short cuts are easier to remember than the ASCII codes.